Online Education and Lectures

06/03/2015

A new partnership between the College Board and Khan Academy offering free online test preparation following a recent major revamp of the SAT college entrance exam could upend traditionally lucrative tutoring businesses, such as Kaplan

Executives in the lucrative test preparation business might have some sweaty palms to look forward to. That’s because when the organization that makes the ubiquitous SAT college entrance test gave the exam a big makeover this week, it also announced an unprecedented partnership with the Khan Academy to provide free online test-prep. And while that’s good news for Khan, it could be bad news for companies like Kaplan that are used to raking in millions from nervous teens who want a leg up on the test.

Khan Academy is one of the most respected online education platforms in the country, and it will enjoy exclusive early access to the new SAT, something that’s never been done before in the history of the College Board, which makes the test. That edge will make it harder for other companies to sell families an advantage through months of elite—and expensive—prep classes or tutoring.

Salman Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, said in an interview.

“If you’re going to charge someone for something, you have to show them value for it. If the test-prep companies think they can add value, I’m sure they’ll try. But from my point of view, this is the College Board making sure it’s not about money.”

Or as David Coleman, president of the College Board, put it Wednesday when he announced the partnership:

“This will be the best thing out there that happens to be free.”

Coleman said the disparty in preparation for the test was building an “iron wall of inequality into the next generation.”

Coleman said on Wednesday.

“It is time for the College Board to say in a clear voice that the culture and practice of test-prep that now surrounds admissions exams drives the perception of inequality and injustice in our country.”

A College Board spokesperson said no money is changing hands in the partnership. Khan is promised early access to the new SAT so its prep program will, in theory at least, be the most effective. Khan Academy, a nonprofit funded by philanthropic donations, will take care of distributing the free program online.

Not that private test-prep companies are about to go belly up. As even Khan himself acknowledged, some parents will surely still hire tutors, even if it’s “just to feel better.”

He said.

“I don’t think it’s going to go away, but I think we can show that it’s not necessary.”

Some test prep companies say they’re not alarmed.

Seppy Basili, vice president at Kaplan, said.

“I think this is a recognition of how important test-prep can be. Competition has always been good for test prep, because it establishes that test-prep is the norm, like anything else.”

But Matt Bardin, who founded and runs the boutique test prep company Veritas Tutors, said the new partnership spells trouble for the traditional prep companies.

He said.

“I’ll be curious to see, when they release sample tests, if [Coleman has] knocked out the five or six ‘tricks’ that built Kaplan and the Princeton Review and have formed the backbone of my industry for 30 years.”

Bardin applauded the high standards Coleman is baking into the new SAT, and said he thought prep companies that emphasize critical thinking and argument structure would still do well. He said

“Coleman’s whole idea is to set the bar high, and the Philistines are coming after him for that. The guy is tearing through American education like a Jersey thunderstorm on a hot summer day.”

But it all depends on whether Khan Academy can make good on its promise to make free prep better than a one-on-one private tutor. Khan knows that students from wealthier families have other advantages besides test-prep, and he doesn’t want this partnership to be seen as a "silver bullet" to education inequality.

Khan said.

“We’d be deluding ourselves if we said that the playing field will be literally level, but if we do what we intend to do, it’ll be at a much lower grade.”

Educators are cautiously optimistic about the new partnership. Dr. Eric Blake, principal of the S.T.A.R. Early College School at Erasmus in Brooklyn, said a program like this would make a massive difference in his students’ chances at going to a good college. Dr Blake said.

“Our students are held back because of costs related to test-prep, so this will surely be removing that barrier.”

Khan said he’s aiming for more than just improving scores; he wants to revolutionize the way kids prepare for college. Khan said.

“If you have a great SAT score that’s great, but the real thing that I care about is that they learn the material, that they are more college ready. The SAT is actually kind of a byproduct; they won’t learn to guess ‘c’ when they don’t know the answer, they’ll learn the actual material.”

COMMENTARY: The changing nature of college admissions in the US has been the source of much stress and confusion to college-bound students and their parents. To understand how the process of getting into college has evolved over time, counselors, educators, students, and parents look to various research studies to derive meaning from the numbers.

Curious to know what the college admissions process is like today? Take a look at StudentAdvisor's infographic "An Inside Look at College Admissions Today" containing data from recent research findings from the National Association of College Admissions Counseling, College Board, and the US Department of Education:

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The Reviews.com research team compiled a list of 38 ACT/SAT prep course companies and then selected the 7 best companies to review based on the 28 most important features. Kaplan was ranked No 1 according to Reviews.com.

Top 7 ACT/SAT Prep Course Companes

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It has been a while since I have followed the latest news from the Khan Academy, and I missed the SAT college prep practice course announcement when it came out in March, but I think this is great news for all high school seniors contemplating taking the ACT or SAT college prep tests. The fact that Khan Academy has partnered with the College Board is a huge plus because it gives the courses legitimacy and the material is straight from the course of the SAT tests. This levels the playing field for underpriveleged students who could not otherwise afford private testing schools like Kaplan or Princeton Review.

Courtesy of an article dated March 6, 2015 appearing in TIME and an article appearing in Student Advisor

08/22/2012

Young children, students K-12 and college students, have all embraced tablets like the Apple iPad, and for this reason more tablets are making their way into the classroom. The following infographic designed by Online Universities.com explains graphically tablet adoption by demographics and how students and teachers are using tablets in their classrooms. The most popular tablets, including the Apple iPad 2, Kindle Fire, Asus Nexus7 and Intel Studybook are compared, and consumers were polled for their opinions regarding tablets, including some speculations surrounding smaller tablets like a rumored iPad Mini and Kindle Fire 2.

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COMMENTARY:

Tablet Adoption - K-12 Classrooms

Tablet computers appear to be having a transformative impact on K-12 classrooms across all grade levels. They certainly offer the promise of empowering students to achieve more and learn with ever-increasing enthusiasm.

It’s important to distinguish between the types of tablets in the market. There are “slate” tablets—like the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet or the Apple iPad—and “convertible tablets” such as the ThinkPad X220t, which provide a combination of laptop and tablet features. In this post, I’m going to be focused on slate tablets.

Tablets have dynamic touch screens and, in some cases, digital pens. Slates in particular offer longer battery life than most PCs, they boot up faster and users enjoy an ever-growing number of applications. Most importantly, they provide extreme mobility. Their small size enables students to move between learning spaces without difficulty—whether those spaces are in school, at home or elsewhere.

“In the past year, advances in tablets have captured the imagination of educators around the world. [Tablets] have come to be viewed as not just a new category of mobile devices, but indeed a new technology in its own right, one that blends features of laptops, smartphones and earlier tablet computers with always-connected Internet, and thousands of apps with which to personalize the experience.”

As an example, Forsyth County Schools in Georgia launched a Bring Your Own Technology program in 2010. Today, more than 80 percent of the district’s students use their own tablets and mobile devices to work on projects at school and at home. Their NOBLE Virtual World Project is a project born from this high adoption rate, and is designed to use mobility to facilitate great cooperation between students and with their teachers.

Interestingly, tablet computers appear to be delivering meaningful results for K-12 students of all ages, despite their relative newness to the market.

“The reason tablets are so important, especially in the lower grades of K-6, is because if students at that age have to use a keyboard it interferes with their ability to absorb and retain information. By removing the keyboard from the learning applications, the tablets are more effective than a laptop or a PC.”

Tablets are also proving valuable to older students. One recent study conducted by the Pearson Foundation, found that tablet ownership quadrupled among college-bound high school seniors in the past year with 17 percent now claiming ownership of one of the devices. In fact, 69 percent of high school seniors said they believed tablets would replace textbooks within the next five years.

Considering these trends, it’s not surprising that tablets would be central to the larger movement toward 1-to-1, mobile-based learning.

Adds the New Media Consortium report.

“People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to. Life in an increasingly busy world where learners must balance demands from home, work, school, and family poses a host of logistical challenges with which today’s ever more mobile students must cope.”

Tablets meet that growing demand for convenience and speed, the report suggests. The report says.

“A faster approach is often perceived as a better approach, and as such people want easy and timely access not only to the information on the network, but to their social networks that can help them to interpret it and maximize its value. The implications for informal learning are profound, as are the notions of ‘just-in-time’ learning and ‘found’ learning, both ways of maximizing the impact of learning by ensuring it is timely and efficient.”

All that being said, we don’t think tablets will be replacement devices for a notebook or PC anytime soon. Tablets are typically more suited for content consumption than content creation. While students can create content on a tablet, they are better suited as a companion device to a PC. Tablets simply are not yet on par with a notebook when it comes to computer power, which limits their ability to create rich content.

What do you think? How are you using tablets — either slate or convertible — in your classrooms? We’ll be talking more about trends in mobility tools in upcoming posts and welcome your feedback.

Tablet Adoption - College Students

Tablet ownership among college students has more than tripled since 2011, according to survey results released Wednesday, March 14, 2012. As students bring more tablets to college, IT leaders likely will be forced to change the way they provide services and interact with students.

Out of approximately 1,200 college students surveyed online in January 2012 by Harris Interactive, 25 percent have a tablet. Last year, that number was only 7 percent.

The survey, commissioned by the Pearson Foundation, dovetailed with an updated 2012 forecast for tablet production. On Tuesday, March 13, the International Data Corp. changed its forecast from 87.7 million units to 106.1 million units. This revision reflected strong Q4 results in the tablet market — partly due to the introduction of the Kindle Fire.

Tablet adoption also is rising among the general U.S. population. Between mid-December and January, the percentage of adults who owned tablets jumped from 10 to 19 percent, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Research Project. In two post-holiday surveys of 2,000 people, 24 percent of tablet owners were 18 to 29 year olds.

The largest user base came from the 30- to 49 year-old range, at 27 percent. Combined, the surveys have a margin error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.

The 2012 NMC Horizon Report suggested that tablet adoption would become mainstream in the education space within a year or less.

In a world where students will own devices and universities won't, campuses need to figure out the role of their IT organization, said A. Michael Berman, a member of the 2012 Horizon Project Higher Education Advisory Board and the vice president for technology and communication at California State University Channel Islands.

In general, universities are anticipating two major changes: End-users will own devices. And tablets will be so inexpensive and common that students won't need to search for and process information at computer labs.

Berman said.

"The idea that you would go somewhere to use something that you don't have — to do those kinds of activities — is really going to be obsolete."

In a few more years, instructors likely will expect students to bring tablets, smartphones and other devices to class. Because tablets should become cheaper, more college students should be able to pay for them.

Berman said.

"The biggest impact will be on teaching and learning because most of us have operated from the premise that computing power is scarce, so you have to go somewhere to get it."

But the shift to tablets also presents challenges, such as distributing software and other tools, and managing security.

Berman said.

"I think that it's easy to see what the general trend is, but it's really hard to understand the implications."

While it's too early to tell what these changes mean, IT leaders know they're coming and that they should try to figure them out as best as they can.

How Apple Plans To Dominate The Education Market

In a blog post dated January 20, 2012, I told you how Apple plans to dominate the educational market with the iPad and eBooks instead of hardcover textbooks, and apps targeting the teacher.

At a New York press conference in late January 2012, Apple announced three products that aim to get students and teachers to use the iPad's touch-screen interface to read, write, plan classes and communicate with each other.

iBooks Author - A free app that lets anyone create a digital, interactive textbook. In a demo at the event, an Apple employee created an e-book with the app in about five minutes, according to live blogs.

iTunes U - Special free software that lets teachers plan their curriculum and communicate with their students over the iPad. iTunes U will "allow anyone, anywhere, at any time to take courses for free.

iBooks 2 - A free app and a new online textbook store that will feature digital e-books for schools. Apple said it is partnering with several major textbook companies -- including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who will make e-books for the store, according to Fortune.

Some Concerns About Tablets

I personally believe that the adoption of tablets by K-12 children and students are a great idea whose time has come. However, not all socio-economic households and schools can afford a tablets, mobile apps and access to WIFI for their school-aged children. For this reason, I am afraid that many families and classrooms will be left behind as tablet technology becomes mainstream. Only higher income households and schools scoring high on standardized tests will be able to afford these new technologies.

My other concerns are privacy issues and proper supervision of students as they gain access to the Internet. Teacher and parental supervision are paramount for all age groups to insure that they are not being exposed to improper online content. Teachers and parents must make sure that tablets are being used responsibly by their children and students, and that these devices are being used for educational activities, not just for playing games and online entertainment.

We won't know the affect tablets and computers will have on the quality of education. Goals must be established and educators must make sure that tablets and other mobile teaching devices are producing higher test scores and grades.

06/19/2012

Inside the online education juggernaut's mission to make their free lessons available in more than a dozen languages.

Khan Academy, one of the world's most popular educational sites, has a problem. People around the world want to learn online. However, the majority of world Internet users aren't fluent English speakers. For Khan Academy, the answer is obvious: Translate content, using the Internet as its translators. Quickly.

Many American high school and college student--as well as many adult, non-students--are already familiar with Khan Academy. The site, founded by former hedge fund analyst Salman Khan, hosts thousands of free, high-quality educational videos. Though most of the site's content focuses on mathematics, hard sciences, and computing, recent videos have begun covering the liberal arts as well.

Salman Khan (Click Image To Enlarge)

The donation-funded non-profit has spent the past few years systematically porting their lectures and tests into over 16 foreign languages. Volunteer workers crowdsourced from the Internet work closely with Khan Academy supervisors to create subtitles for lectures, along with voiceovers for select videos.

According to Khan Academy Dean of Translations Bilal Musharraf (Yes, that's his official title; Musharraf is the son of former Pakistani Prime Minister Pervez Musharraf), the organization crowdsources translators through Universal Subtitles' Amara platform, which recruits volunteers worldwide to write foreign language and closed-caption translations. Other Universal Subtitles clients include TED and PBS.

Translated content availability for Khan Academy varies wildly from language to language. Estonian is the most frequently subtitled language, with over 500 videos available, followed by Polish and Spanish. Dubbed content is available in 16 languages including Bangla, Hebrew, Malayalam, and Swahili. Musharraf tells Fast Company that each language has an official "Language Advocate" whose job is to review translations for accuracy and fluency. Language Advocates review both subtitles for Khan Academy videos and audio dubs.

Creating subtitled Khan Academy videos doesn't just boost the website's profile in non-Anglophone markets. Subtitles also help Khan Academy work SEO magic and lure in new viewers via Google and other search engines. The not-so-dirty secret is that video transcripts are fully searchable and can help make Khan Academy's content easier to discover.

While any Khan Academy user can subtitle videos, dubbing requires a stricter approval process. Potential voice-over volunteers undergo strict vetting by the non-profit; Khan places great importance on hand-holding voiceover artists and close supervision to guarantee accuracy and a consistent tone. In most cases, Khan Academy tries to use one voiceover person for each foreign language. Translators are expected to contribute a significant time investment; Khan Academy's Bangla project, for instance, requires at least 20 hours a week of volunteering.

Khan Academy's subtitle project began at the end of 2010 and is ongoing. Current language priorities, according to Musharraf, are Spanish, Portuguese, and Bengali. In the longer term, Khan Academy also plans to add original foreign language content--lectures and chats conducted from start to finish in non-English languages with no translation involved. Volunteers for translation are still being accepted.

Khan Academy Highlights:

2,600+ learning videos in its library.

At the end of December 2011, Khan Academy saw 4 million unique users. That’s up from 1 million in the same period in 2010, and up from 3.5 million in October.

The Khan Academy team is currently made up of 22 people, and they’re hiring ~1 more per month.

“I’d say that 90% [of the videos are shot] in 1 take. 99% are 2 takes.”

“I will definitely do much more advanced mathematics in the next year than what we have now.” (This resulted in Michael Nielson, leading quantum computing expert and author of the standard text on the subject, to offer his assistance right in the thread)

Foundation grants received todate:

Bill and Mellinda Gates Foundation in July 2011 - $1.5 million

Google in July 2011 - $2 million

The O'Sullivan Foundation in November 2011 - $5 million

COMMENTARY: I've been blogging about the Khan Academy since August 2010 when I first learned of the bold effort by former hedge fund analyst Salman Khan, to produce 15 minute videos to teach math and science to school kids.

In the old days, Salman Khan churned out video teaching lessons from a converted walk-in closet in his Silicon Valley home (Click Image To Enlarge)

Thanks to the benevolence of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been able to raise sufficient capital to hire a CEO and sufficient staff to expand Khan Academy worlwide.

Here's Salman Khan making an appearance at the Good Experience Live conference back on May 14, 2010.

On March 18, 2012, Khan Academy founder Salman Khan was interviewed by Sanjay Gupta for CBS' "60 Minutes" television program. It was an incredible interview showing Khan at work putting together his famous teaching videos.

The language barrier was going to become an issue sooner, rather than later, and I am glad the Khan is addressing that issue. It will be a monumental task to translate all those videos into non-English languages.

03/20/2012

Offline learning is the latest tool for the unorthodox education organization. Here's how that and other new features will power Khan Academy's new app.

Khan Academy, the wildly popular YouTube lecture series, has launched its free, new iPad app in Apple's store. The enhanced version of Khan Academy includes time-syncing between devices--no Internet connection required--an interactive transcript of the lectures for easy searching, and a handy scrubber for moving between parts of the lectures. Perhaps more importantly, now that more schools have begun adopting Khan's lectures for their own classrooms, the iPad app could possibly replace or supplement textbooks, saving cash-strapped schools and students a lot of money.

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The major benefit of the app is offline learning. Khan Academy Lead Designer Jason Rosoff says.

"If you're going on a road trip or if you're taking mass transit and you don't have cell service, or whatever, you can get the content."

The iPad frees Khan Academy from the constraints of a laptop and Internet connection. Rosoff says the app will remember where users left off viewing and sync progress between devices (though, for the initial version, both devices will need to connect to the Internet before going offline to sync).

Second, with inspiration from TED, Khan lectures will now have an interactive time-stamped transcript, which is a convenient search function, considering some of the lectures can be quite long.

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Last, just like a textbook, users flip back and forth between different parts of the content. Rosoff says.

"People scrub a lot in our videos."

The app will have an enhanced version video scrubber (the scroll bar at the bottom of a video) that makes repeating areas less painful.

For the growing number of schools that are adopting iPads, the most impactful potential for the app is for Khan Academy's "flipped classroom," in which lectures are watched at home by students, and then assignments are completed collaboratively in class, where a teacher is present. Shantanu Sinha, President and COO of Khan Academy says.

"The teacher is free to do a lot more of the human interaction."

Intrigued by the idea of the flipped classroom, a pilot program in the Los Altos school district in California has started using Khan's online lectures for a substantial portion of the learning. Teachers use visualization software that could track student progress in the lectures, and they've discovered that some students were often mislabeled as "at-risk."

Sinha says.

"Very often, students who thought they were horrible in math, who were labeled bad in math by schools ... in many cases, they were just struggling with a very specific topic. Without the ability to explore lectures at home, struggling students were left behind as teachers progressed through the lesson plan. But, when students could focus on problem areas at their own pace, they could overcome weaknesses and catch back up with the class."

The initial version of the iPad app doesn't include the visualization tools and exercises necessary for a Khan Academy classroom, Rosoff says, but once the tools are part of the app, schools may adopt the Khan lecture series as a electronic textbook replacement. That'll also give Khan more time to address early feedback about the tools in later app updates.

COMMENTARY: In a blog post dated August 24, 2010, I first profiled Khan Academy's Sal Khan. He gave up a successful career as a hedge fund analyst to teach children using his self-taught YouTube teaching videos. Bill Gates caught his eye, and the rest his history.

The fact that Bill Gates has applauded his work and also invested $1.5 million into Khan Academy is a testament to Mr. Khan's importance to teaching. If Bill Gates gives you his seal of approval, then that is a huge plus.

This past Sunday, March 18, 2012, Khan Academy founder Salman Khan was interviewed by Sanjay Gupta for CBS' "60 Minutes" television program. It was an incredible interview showing Khan at work putting together his famous teaching videos.

The new Khan Academy iPhone app will allow students to work on Khan Academy teaching lectures the ideal teaching platform.

Khan Academy Highlights:

2,600+ learning videos in its library.

At the end of December 2011, Khan Academy saw 4 million unique users. That’s up from 1 million in the same period in 2010, and up from 3.5 million in October.

The Khan Academy team is currently made up of 22 people, and they’re hiring ~1 more per month.

“I’d say that 90% [of the videos are shot] in 1 take. 99% are 2 takes.”

“I will definitely do much more advanced mathematics in the next year than what we have now.” (This resulted in Michael Nielson, leading quantum computing expert and author of the standard text on the subject, to offer his assistance right in the thread)